Climate changes

THE record of atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels started by the late Dave Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography is one of the most crucial of the data sets dealing with global warming. When the measurements started in 1959 the annual average level was 315 parts per million, and it has gone up every year since. To begin with it went up by roughly one part per million per year. Now it is more like two parts per million per year. The figure for 2011 is 391.6. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means a stronger greenhouse effect, and various measurements speak to this. Global surface temperature records show a warming over the same period, though because of fluctuations in the climate, air pollution, volcanic eruptions and other confounding factors the rise is nothing like as smooth. A steadier rise can be seen in the heat content of the oceans, measured in terms of the energy stored, rather than the temperature.

Exactly. For your average Merkin, science equals socialism because neither of them require God. The disbelieving comments from Merkins about climate change can be translated as......."You are a Godless XX...I am a medieval supernaturalist"

Alas the judges and juries are politicians, which does not inspire confidence. The verdict looks like condemning billions to prolonged poverty as a conseqeunce of a "solution" which has little likelihood of success. Maybe we should throw our energies into mitigating/addressing the consequences of global warming, if in reality it does eventuate for whatever reason, rather than throw all our money into a "solution" based on predictive models which are highly sensitve to undelying assumptions and have a significant probability of being flawed.

Science is about facts and proof and hard evidence. Scientific fact is not determined by majority views or consensus. I've seen and read too much "climategate" type evidence to suggest the alarmists' case is biased, fundamentally and morally corrupt. Sorry, but I am not convinced.

Like "Nature" I presume? Thus far most of the world's media have been very reluctant to publish any contrary date or air any meaningful debate on TV. Eventually the proof will be in the pudding, just like we finally accepted that the world is was (almost)round

Wow, so many words without saying anything meaningful. How much are you being paid to post this drivel? You've gone to a lot of trouble to spread FUD, too much in fact for anyone not paid to spout it.

Also, if you think Obama and his admin. are socialist/communist you are either monumentally stupid, a liar, or simply don't know what the terms mean and just parrot what you hear on conservative "news" media...

Bangladesh was a half-joke. What is dead serious is that the first and worst victims of warming would be the countries least responsible for it and least able to pay for adaptation, which will likely cost far more than prevention.

I agree with you on North-American wastefulness, but not on the size of the CO2 effect or on coal.

Most scientists DO think CO2 emissions contribute in a major way to climate change. There are a few who do not, like Lindzen and Christy, but they are a small minority. The problem is that part of the media gives the false impression that the scientists are divided on this issue. They simply aren't.

And for anyone who acceptst the majority scientific view, it is only logical to factor climate future change related damage that into the price of coal.

The argument is not whether there's been any global warming at all (we'd expect some from the natural warming since the ice age plus some from the basic physics that CO2 has a moderate greenhouse effect). The argument is whether CO2 has the alarming warming effect as predicted by climate models of 0.2C per decade, which has only been observed during two short periods in the entire temperature record, yet the IPCC incredibly extrapolated all the way to 2100.

Limits to Growth did have a beneficial impact in that it heightened global awareness that the planet's resources were finite and should not be wasted. It contained many scenarios, some of which resulted in clearly flawed models/projections. History has highlighted the sensitivity of future modelling projections to base modelling assumptions. I happen to believe that a lot of alarmists' research and modelling has (with perhaps good intent - i.e we should conserve) when different assumption options were available, selected only those model inputs which were most likely to result in the case they wanted to demonstrate, I.e. anthropogenic genetaion of CO2 is the primary cause of global warming.

Do politicians decide what articles to accept in Nature and Science? Do they tell the Academies of Science whether or not to accept human-induced climate change as a scientific fact? No, they don't.

Politicians just get the results handed over by scientists when the evidence is strong enough to come to a conclusion. In the case of CO2 causing significant, dangerous climate change, that verdict is in. All major academies of science agree.

Wise politicians then propose ways of dealing with the problem. Idiots try to deny the evidence.

Yes, it seems so simple. But it isn't if you look closer. Absolute proof only exists in mathematics. Elsewhere, proof is ultimately a matter of judgement. Judgement based on evidence and fact, but judgement non the less. Similar to a court case, actually. There is evidence, and then judge/jury decide based on that evidence.

Just so, all these scientists base their judgment on their knowledge as scientists, weighing the evidence and the logical arguments based on that evidence. They each come to a conclusion, and if the vast majority agrees that CO2 causes significant, harmful climate change, the safest bet is to assume they are right.

Science hardly ever gives 100% certainty, and a wise man doesn;t sit around wating for that level of certainty. The sooner we start to change our energy infrastructure, the more damage (floods, droughts, etc) we can avoid.

Okay, allow me to explain. You first come with all kind of questions that science has tried to answer. But you don't seem to have made any effort to find out what scientists have found. We have the internet now, and wikipedia is usually a good place to start.

You then conclude that humans are not causing climate change. You cannot have concluded that from your knowledge of the mechanisms which caused the climate to change in the past, or those that cause it to change now, because you know nothing of them.

Those past and present mechansism are not necessarily the same, so it is a fallacy to say that because climate changed before there were humans, therefore the current changes cannot be due to human activity.

If you had looked up some answers to your questions, you would have found that changes in the past were due to the interplay of factors like solar output, fluctuations in the earth's tilt, volcanic activity, ocean currents and fluctuations in atmospheric greenhouse gases (notably CO2).

This is all perfectly compatible with the current warming being due to human CO2 emissions that have increased the greenhouse effect (the blanket that keeps us all warm).

1. The first article you link is in reference to a study showing that the melting of ice from Greenland is slower and more complex than previously thought, but that melting is unequivocally still occurring. To declare victory here is rather premature.

2. As you state, yes, sea level is still rising, and the rate at which sea level rise is occurring is increasing. This is expected considering both increased loss of glacial and land ice from melting and thermal expansion of the ocean, as illustrated in the global ocean heat content curve above.

3. Would you care to comment on the overall temperature change from 1850 to present, instead of cherry picking intervals where the start point matches the endpoint? Any rational individual would take away from that figure that the Earth has warmed on order of 1 degree since 1850.

4. "Natural warming since the ice age" is blatantly incorrect. The post-ice age warming ceased with the onset of the Holocene Thermal Maximum around 8,000 years ago. Since that time, reconstructions of global temperatures suggest moderate, continuous cooling until the warming reversal in the past 150 years.

I'm going to have to request that you remove the word "science" from the opening line of your post, as your misinterpretations of a collection of cherry picked newspaper articles and hyperlinks demonstrates your inability to use the scientific method correctly.

So what is the plan? Teach people in Bangladesh how to swim?
For the record, not only were the club of Rome predictions never part of an overwhelming scientific consensus, but their most commonly misquoted false prediction (oil reserves being depleted by 1992, ASSUMING EXPONENTIAL GROWTH AT PRE-1973 RATES) was the most pessimistic of several scenarios presented and was explicitly declared to be highly unlikely by the club itself in the very publication.